Another late post, apologies for any typos, Organic Chemistry is getting the best of my time lately.

Let’s be optimistic and assume you did some of the lifts mentioned in the last post. Or that you’ve been lifting for a while and decided to amp up your training. Or that your training periodization calls for a change-up this week.

Point is, recovery should be on every single athlete’s mind. Considering when you work out, especially with high-volume or high-load routine (lets say today was your 1RM day), you are putting massive loads on not just your muscles, but your entire “human system.” When you exercise, you place both physical and energetic demands on your muscles that result in molecular level trauma and oxidative stress on the muscular cells, respectively. What does this all mean? You’re really beating the hell out of your body.

But don’t worry! This is what you are supposed to do! You have to place these demands on your muscles to get healthier (and stronger). To reap the benefits of muscle anabolism (metabolic growth), you need to place the cells under stress – specifically stress that causes signals to be sent around the body “requesting” the release of testosterone and IGF-I (insulin-like growth factor 1), two chemicals that influence muscle growth. Heavy loads, high volume (reps X sets) with small rest periods, and exercises that work multiple muscle groups (squat and deadlift, people) have all been proven to increase post- and intra-workout testosterone and IGF-I levels, leading to high muscle anabolism. This would be great if only exercise and hormones were involved, it’d be simple. But it’s not.

Now, once you have it in your mind, you don’t really need to think about it, but it’s important for any athlete or really anyone who’s interested in fitness to understand the subtle nuances of muscle recovery:

When you exercise, as mentioned before, muscle damage occurs. After said damage happens, an immune response is stimulated, opening blood flow to the muscles and promoting a flow of oxygen and nutrients. This blood flow has the double effect of both providing the muscle what it needs to recover and allowing the expedited removal of reactive oxygen species (jargon for “free radicals,” the product of oxidative stress from glycolysis in the muscle). This immune response is important, so let me go on record now and say if you have DOMS (Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness, also known as “Ow, I really hit my legs hard yesterday), do not take NSAID’s like Advil or Tylenol. They decrease the inflammatory immune response (as well as inhibiting a few enzymes that aid muscle anabolism) and therefore “starve” your muscles of the beneficial flush of blood they get from the workout.

While on the subject of muscle soreness post-workout, also known as DOMS, I’d like to go over some of the subtleties of the condition. First off, as with anything, know your body. This isn’t as simple as it seems: you need to know your threshold for pain and know how to differentiate between different types of soreness and pain. Why? Because they will influence what you do “next.” For bone pain or joint pain, very specific types of pain, LAY OFF IT. There is nothing you can do – bone needs rest to recover and cartilage, which makes up your joints, is avascular (it has no blood flow, and as follows logically takes much more time to heal and does not benefit from a blood flush like muscle). For muscle soreness, I’ve found the best approach to this is to slowly work out the muscle in the safest manner possible. Individualized, as the level of soreness dictates, I call this type of training, “Recovery training,” as it is distinctly different from “Rest.” For example, let’s say your traps are very sore from some Power Shrugs (an advanced technique I’ll get into in another post, just imagine the motion of shrugging and the muscle it uses on your body) yesterday – so much to the point that you really don’t even want to deadlift today. That’s okay, but you cannot just let the muscle sit and expect it to heal. This is where the immune flush response becomes valuable. What you want to do today is to do light shrugs, maybe 20-50% of your normal load, higher reps than normal with comfortable rest to encourage blood flow to the muscle. Working the muscle is ALWAYS better than letting it sit and fester.

Even with a muscle tear, the best trainers (Mark Rippetoe, for one: http://vimeo.com/20303779) advocates training the muscle in the most effective manner the muscle functions (curls for bicep, etc.) to encourage muscle anabolism rather than the formation of scar tissue that makes the rebuilt patch completely useless.

Now that we’ve gone over soreness, let’s talk about food. Specifically the fuel with which you are going to build your muscles. Ideally, post-workout, to take advantage of both the immune flush and the release of testosterone and IGF-I, you should be eating a meal of relatively high protein and unsaturated fat content and medium carbohydrate content approximately 30 mins and 2 hours after your workout. Defining “high” and “medium?” It depends on your body composition and workout intensity, but I’ve always gone by the “30-30 in 30” rule: 30 grams of complete protein (see bottom) and 30 grams of a carbohydrate that is NOT high fructose corn syrup within 30 minutes of your workout. Personally, I drink an protein shake with 42-50 grams protein (along with calcium, vitamin C, other supplements) and about 50 grams of carbohydrate immediately following my workout. When I get home, about 1:30 after my workout, I’ll pan fry myself a steak or two chicken breasts and have some Greek yogurt and Colby pepper cheese to go with it. The methodology behind it is this: All are high in protein, the steak gives me a complete protein source, the yogurt gives me an acceptable amount of carbohydrate along with protein, and the cheese makes it all more palatable and provides a source of saturated fats (which are important in testosterone production). Some will recognize this as a “paleo” diet, and they’d be right. I’ve seen my squat and other lifts go up as a result of cutting out HFCS and adding more protein to my diet. But I’m getting off track.

Sleep, next to fuel, is the most important factor in recovery. 6-7 hours is acceptable, but 8-9 is ideal. While you are far away in dreamland, your body is hard at work fixing all the damage you did today squatting and deadlifting. It makes sense – your body is completely at rest, brain isolated from the motor neurons, muscles at rest. When does the DOT do roadwork? At night, when there’s no traffic. Do yourself a favor and don’t skimp on sleep, or not only will you feel like crap the next day, but all of your lifts will suffer and you risk putting your entire program in jeopardy of not meeting your goals.

Since we’ve covered immediately after and in the near future of your workout, the only thing left is for me to scare you into following my advice!

Overtraining: a condition characterized by a decrease in strength and endurance marked by tiredness, muscular fatigue, and weight gain.

How do you get this? Not resting/recovering enough. Overtraining is linked with a whole bunch of other responses your body has to stress, the main one being what psychologists call “General Adaptation Disorder.” GAD comes when the body is put under constant and unrelenting stress (among the reasons for periodizing your training) and is not allowed to recover. Characterized by immune depression, increased insulin activity resulting in high fat storage, and catabolism (breaking down) of muscle tissue post-workout, GAD is anyone’s worst nightmare. GAD and Overtraining go hand in hand because when one occurs, the other is never far behind. The only way to save yourself and avoid these conditions is to allow adequate recovery time after every workout, and, if you are going to train heavy for several sequential days, allow decompression time for your body to recover.

I’ll leave you with this: You get nowhere just solely breaking down your body. It’s important to know both how to train and how to rebuild after training. Approach your rest days with the same scrutiny and vigor with which you tackle your “on” days.

As always, shoot me any questions you might have, and thanks for reading!

-Matt

Complete Protein: a source of protein that contains the amino acids Tryptophan, Threonine, Isoleucine, Leucine, Lysine, Methionine, Phenylalanine, Valine, and Histidine in a manner useable to the human body.